Compound Interest. It can be your best friend (in your investment or savings account) and your greatest enemy (debt). The mathematics behind how your money or debt compounds can be beautifully simplistic or complex depending on how you look at it. For those of us interested in a simplistic, visual approach to understanding how it works, we have a great tool available to us known as a compound interest calculator.

Anyone would like to know how much interest he or she has to pay on a mortgage or a loan. You would also want to keep track of the amount of interest to pay over a given period of time if you are borrowing money. The simplest formula to use when calculating interest rate is P x(1 + r/n)^ Yn where P = principal, r = rate, n = number of times per year for interest compounding and Y = the number of years for the loan. Sometimes, it can be challenging to manually calculate the interest on a loan and you can also make mistakes. Instead of calculating manually, you can use a compound interest calculator to calculate your compound interest.

With the compound interest calculator, you can know how much you shall have saved after a certain number of years and you can also know how much of your final balance is due to make more interest for you. The calculator is very easy to use. You just need to enter the needed information in the fields specified. You should enter your original deposit in the principal box, your APY in the Rate box and the length of time in the Years box. After inputting the information as required, you can then hit on calculate to get the results. You can either select to calculate your rate using months or years.

The compound interest calculator can be very important to both bankers and those holding savings accounts. Whether you are a lender or a borrower, you will find this tool very useful when it comes to keeping track of how much money you are earning or how much money you would have to pay on a loan. Obviously there are differences based on your location but also most financial transactions are fairly standardized in the developed world – there are EU rules for example which control transactions in Europe. It is an easy to use tool that does not need any special skills. You can find the software online. You can do all your calculations just sitting in front of your computer.

Financial management is something that some people take for granted and it can be very crucial when it comes to financial stability. You might be losing a lot of money without actually understanding how if you cannot track your savings properly. Compound calculators will make things very easy even for dummies. They can also be very useful when you need to determine a loan program to get if you are looking for a loan. When shopping around, you can use this calculator to compare the interest rates between the different lending companies before selecting which one to get.